In California, the governor recently vetoed legislation that would have allowed most cities to use ranked-choice voting. His explanation is a bit odd:
> Ranked choice is an experiment that has been tried in several charter cities in California. Where it has been implemented, I am concerned that it has often led to voter confusion, and that the promise that ranked choice voting leads to greater democracy is not necessarily fulfilled.
Newsom's own San Francisco is one of the places that has used ranked-choice voting, and I've not once heard of voter confusion. So the explanation seems rather disingenuous.
I worked as a poll worker in San Francisco during the 2016 elections. I answered so many questions about ranked choice voting that I got tired of it by the end of the day. I would guess that more than 50% of voters were somewhat confused. Some of them were so confused that they botched the ballot twice, and had to return to the desk to pick up new ballots. Other times, the voter thought they had filled it out correctly only to have it rejected at the voting machine. These problems definitely increased queue times and size of the waiting line.
Newsom may have other motives but I don't think his explanation is disingenuous.
Do you have any sense for whether the confusion was related to ranked choice itself, or a poorly laid out ballot?
When rolling out ranked choice, I would expect to need lots of additional messaging before and during polling so nobody is surprised. And also a complete re-evaluation of the ballot's layout to ensure it's usable. I have no idea if either of those happened in CA.
Edit - looking at TimJRobinson's post below, if that's how CA cities laid out their ballots, I'm not surprised there were many errors. That sea of bubbles is hard to read and very easy to apply a pen mark in the wrong place. At minimum, the bubbles themselves should be filled with the number which they represent.
I think this is because how it's implemented. In the USA I've mostly seen it implemented as a grid of bubbles because it's better for machines to process, and I found it pretty confusing at first (see https://www.fairvote.org/rcv_ballot_design), imagine this for 20+ candidates like Queensland often has.
I think the Australian system of writing the numbers in boxes is way easier to follow, though I don't know what happens if you fill them in wrong.
The ideal solution IMO is a touch screen machine with a list of candidates, you drag and drop your order of preference, then when you're done it prints out a paper ballot which you can double check is correct then drop in the ballot box.
> Ranked choice is an experiment that has been tried in several charter cities in California. Where it has been implemented, I am concerned that it has often led to voter confusion, and that the promise that ranked choice voting leads to greater democracy is not necessarily fulfilled.
https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/SB-212-Vet...
Newsom's own San Francisco is one of the places that has used ranked-choice voting, and I've not once heard of voter confusion. So the explanation seems rather disingenuous.